There appears to be a separation between reality and myth, but what if there were no distinction and it was all intertwined like a vine plant sprawled upon an ancient tree? The beginning becomes the end and the end the middle. Crawling, spiraling up towards the heavens, where no distinction lies between ancient and new creation. The question begins to persist, “Was this ancient and magnificent tree ever present without the vine? Or have they always been joined in harmony and the one will die not long after it is without the other?”
Our society has grown in a world where we are expected to believe in magic, that good always triumphs over evil, and that every story has a happy ending. Our time as youths has been filled with Disney movies full of beautiful princesses, handsome princes and faraway kingdoms. At an early age the majority of young girls begin their lifelong search for their prince charming to come and sweep them off their feet, carrying them away to their kingdom where they will live happily ever after. But life does not always deliver this glorious ending. Have the well-known stories always been this happy and go-lucky? Bringing false hope to those who believe? Or is there another beginning, long before Disney, that shows the real versions of these make-believe stories?
Many will agree that the Disney movies are merely a prettier version of the real morbid stories in which they are based from – folklore from villages all around the world. Possibly the most famous written collection of these fairy tale stories is composed by the well-known brothers from Germany, the Brothers Grimm. Even so, the majority of the today’s society is more likely unfamiliar with these original tales than the newer, happier versions where violence and abhorring events do not hold near as much description as may be found in the Brothers Grimm stories. However, even the Grimm stories end happily where animals transform into handsome princes and the “bad guy” gets what he deserves, which is usually portrayed in a fairly graphic manner.
Some may argue that even the Brothers Grimm stories are not the true versions, but rather stories created centuries before the Grimm brothers were even alive by more ancient civilizations such as the Greeks or the ancient Norsemen. I am not here to argue which versions of the stories did appear first or which is the real version, but merely the relationship between the eras and how “stories bridge generations” (Grimm p. ix).
“The repetition of a mythical event, with its play of variations, tells us that something remote is beckoning to us. There is no such thing as the isolated mythological even, just as there is no such thing as the isolated word. Myth, like language, gives all of itself in each of its fragments. When a myth brings into play repetition and variants, the skeleton of the system emerges for a while, the latent order, covered in seaweed.”
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony p. 136
Just like the winding vine, fairy tales are consistently changing with the passing of time. The only element of these tales which does not change is their base line – the ancient tree. According to Max Lüthi, the world of fairy tales is “an abstract world, full of discrete,
interchangeable people, objects, and incidents, all of which are isolated and are nevertheless interconnected, in a kind of web or network of two-dimensional meaning.” (Grimm p. xix) Calasso in his book The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony describes myth in a similar manner, as “the precedent behind every action” where those events which happen are not as unique to the individual it is happening to as one would think. Harmony is contemplating her arranged marriage with Cadmus and realizes that “for every step, the footprint was already there”. The same could be stated for the vine. Every year it dies, and every year it re-grows. This re-growth is destined to occur on the exact same tree beginning in the same location and no matter the path it chooses to take it will always end in the identical place, atop the tree and reaching for the heavens. In the introduction to the book The Annotated Brothers Grimm, it is stated that, “Everything in the fairy tales appears to happen entirely by chance – and this has the strange effect of making it appear that nothing happens by chance, that everything is fated.” (Grimm p. xix).
It is true that there appears to be a very distinct difference between the Greek and Roman mythological tales and the folklore and fairy tales of later civilizations. Both may have some mayhem and agony, but the fairy tales always seem to have blissful endings of love, wealth, and/or peace emerging from the trials presented to the main character. The majority of Greek myths, on the other hand, seem to end with despair, death, or punishment. Their characters end up suffering like Io, being abducted and inevitably raped by Zeus, turned into a cow, and then abandoned, having only a rather bothersome gadfly as company (Calasso p.5). Or these characters experience horrific deaths such as Icarius, who was unjustly punished for sharing the gift given to him by Dionysus, wine, and was beaten and stabbed to death as a result (Calasso p.38). Freud had claimed that the one item that distinguished myth and fairy tales were that myths were “related to disaster” while fairy tales were “related to daydreams and wish-fulfillment fantasies” (Grimm p. xviii).
However, even the fairy tales of Disney have their frightening sides. As I re-watch my favorite princess movies from my childhood such as Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the non-Disney Anastasia, the innocence of them turns out to be not so harmless and more disturbing than I remembered. Even the newer Disney cartoon, The Princess and the Frog had some very spine-chilling moments in it with the voodoo used by the “evil” person. It is true that they all end happily ever after and the princess ends with the prince, but even these newest modified versions still contain some of that blood curdling creepiness that can so easily be seen in the Brothers Grimm fairy tales.
The Grimm tales are well known for having more graphic and morbid context. These versions that are well recognized aren’t even as horrendous as those which may have been told to them while they were forming their collection. In realizing that children tended to be more attracted to their gathering of stories over the scholars in whom they were originally intended for, the Grimms made them more child friendly. But not all of their collected tales were simplified; some were left as adult fairy tales such as “How Children Played Barber with Each Other”. There are two versions of this story. One of these ends in a much happier manner than the other, with the child playing the butcher being declared innocent and too ignorant to realize what had happened. He is set free and not condemned for this reason. The other ending is not near as favorable. To make an already short story shorter, everyone dies. The mother rushes down to the horror of her one child having slit the throat of the other. Filled with rage she stabs the remaining child. Still having one more child, it drowns in the bathtub while she is stabbing its sibling. Overcome with grief she kills herself and her husband dies not long after due to sorrow. This horrific tale appears to have come from a Greek tragedy rather than a fairy tale book. There is not a single thing in this tale which could be connected to the archetype of fairy tales.
This being said, there must be some link between that glorious tree and that consuming vine; those footsteps which have been predestined. How could such a link between so many centuries exist? Stories have been passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth for years. Before words had yet to be written and become “etched models of silence that speaks” (Calasso p. 39), stories were depicted through the eyes of the narrator. With no written words of the story, the narrator is free to mold and modify the elements of the tales being spoken, causing a constant change in the way the story is told. An example of this would be any of the well known fairy tales such as Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty), Snow Drop (Snow White), The Princess and the Frog, and Cinderella who alone has 345 different versions (Grimm p. xxii).
The variance of tales is easily explained among areas, but how is it possible for civilizations across oceans and centuries to have similar variations of seemingly the same story? Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher, gives the notion that “every culture relies on both native and non-native lore to construct the stories it tells” (Grimm p. xxxv). He splits the world population into two groups, those who farm and receive income from the land and those who travel by sea, or sea merchants. The soil tillers represent the story tellers whose stories are deeply rooted to tradition. The seamen, on the other hand, are those who import exotic, mystical, and alien tales. Over time these translations slowly combine to create the numerous styles currently found today.
It is seemingly easy to relate those stories which have been branched off of one another, but correlating mythology with fairy tales is another thing. However a connection can be made. Even though the Roman and Greek myths are full of ruin, misery, and seemingly always ending in death or eternal punishment, when those aspects of the story are taken from it, a magical world of heroes, monsters, and far away kingdoms much like those found in the modern day fairy tales are revealed.
If Benjamin's theory on the expansion of fairy tales is correct, then there is no reason as to why the Greek and Roman myths should not also have an influence on these tales. The mythological story of Eros and Psyche is an excellent source to use to give some sort of insight as to how mythology may have influenced our modern stories. The story begins with a jealous goddess, Aphrodite, who sends a skilled archer, Eros, to put a curse on Psyche because of her beauty, but her beauty saves her and the archer falls in love with her instead. She is then “swept” away to a far off kingdom where an invisible stranger, Eros, informally makes her his wife (Snow White). Deceit by her sisters causes her to betray this secret lover whom she cannot see and look at his true self, only to discover not a hideous serpent like her sisters suggested but a handsome god (Beauty and the Beast). Infuriated he leaves and she must complete some dangerous tasks which she does with the help of nature (Hasty and the Princess). The last task makes her overcome with sleep. Eros comes and wakes her, taking her to his kingdom on top of Mt. Olympus where they live happily ever after (Sleeping Beauty).
This is a rather simplified description of the myth, but the connection can effortlessly be made between mythology and fairy tales. However, this may not always be as possible, especially when trying to compare stories of the numerous women abducted by the gods or a “hero” and abandoned not long after. The girls always appear to become infatuated such as Adriadne, only to become isolated and doomed for a miserable destruction. But when the story is picked apart, the ending removed, and the middle examined, a correlation can be made. Keeping with the Adriadne example, her story did begin with the hopes of having a fairy tale ending. A young, strong, handsome hero comes from a far off land, defeats the town monster, woos the princess and carries her off with him; the basic story line of the majority of fairy tales.
And so the vine continues to grow, wrapping itself around the oldest tales and converting them into something new. But even these new stories contain something that can only be traced back to the tree in which it embraces. The classic stories change with time, yet all are interchangeable and intertwined. With these daydreams and wishful fantasies mixed with “secular dreams of youthful humanity” (Grimm p. xviii), the real story begins – in illo tempore.
